Here’s a great idea for all of you liberals who are concerned with climate change, global warming or whatever we’re calling it this week. Remain virgins. Or, failing that, just make sure you’re not getting pregnant or impregnating anyone else. (You gender ambidextrous types can sort out which side of that feat you fall on for yourselves.) That’s the new advice coming out of Sweden this month (and honestly… where else did you think it came from?) and I have to say I’m super excited over it. (NPR)

But there’s another way to help the climate. A recent study from Lund University in Sweden shows that the biggest way to reduce climate change is by having fewer children.

“I knew this was a sensitive topic to bring up,” says study co-author Kimberly Nicholas on NPR’s Morning Edition. “Certainly it’s not my place as a scientist to dictate choices for other people. But I do think it is my place to do the analysis and report it fairly.”

The study concludes that four high-impact ways to reduce CO2 gas emissions include having fewer children, living without a car, avoiding airplane travel and eating a vegetarian diet.

Let’s break down the top four pieces of advice here in list order so they’re easier to digest.

Have fewer children

Live without a car

Don’t travel by plane

Eat a vegetarian diet

As with anything in life, it’s the activists who are most concerned with a particular subject who must lead the way and set an example for others. Since this is primarily an issue on the left, I have to say that I heartily endorse this entire platform. Of course, some of its most ardent proponents may fall victim to the law of unintended consequences.

First of all, having less children is a fabulous idea. If we have a generation of kids coming along who are either home schooled or at least raised in conservative households, things might actually start looking up in twenty or thirty years. Of course, if you do manage to get the population to shrink in any measurable way, keep in mind that the ratio of those working and paying into social safety net programs to those who are collecting from them will be even more out of whack. But don’t let that bother you. There’s a planet to be saved.

Don’t own a car? Super. There’s way too much traffic out there as it is and if we could cut it in half, those of us who are still motoring around can get to important destinations more easily… like our jobs. Thanks guys!

Don’t fly? See the car situation above. Flying is miserable. I don’t expect conditions to improve very much just because there are fewer passengers, but you’ll at least marginally increase my chances of booking a flight that isn’t entirely full. And not for nothing, but all of that patchouli oil is really stinking up the economy class cabin.

Be a vegetarian. Yes indeed. Go for it. What you eat is your business, but with fewer people shopping for beef it’s less likely that the butcher shop will be sold out of Delmonico cuts when I get there on Friday afternoon. You save the world and there’s more beef for me. This is a win-win.

You know, it’s a rare day when I find myself agreeing with the latest scheme to roll out of Sweden designed to save the planet, but this one is a serious winner. Let’s all get behind this and make it happen for all of our liberal friends and neighbors.

Al Gore thinks the weather has been out of the Book of Revelation, while Time and ABC News have reported that Antarctica is melting very quickly. Now, it’s not (via NASA):

The melt rate of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is an important concern, because this glacier alone is currently responsible for about 1 percent of global sea level rise. A new NASA study finds that Thwaites’ ice loss will continue, but not quite as rapidly as previous studies have estimated.
The new study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, finds that numerical models used in previous studies have overestimated how rapidly ocean water is able to melt the glacier from below, leading them to overestimate the glacier’s total ice loss over the next 50 years by about 7 percent.

Despite what liberals may say about global warming, science is never a settled issue. That’s what you should glean from this. The studies can be wrong. The models can be wrong. And the question nations face concerning so-called global warming is whether they want to invest hundreds of billion, if not trillions, of dollars on a group of people who have been wrong before. How much economic growth, decreased standard of living, less prosperity, and the accompanying misery will you artificially inflict among those in your society on predictions that have been grossly inaccurate? In the 1970s, global cooling was the threat that could spell mankind’s doom. Nothing ever happened.

Peter Gwynne has gone back and updated his 1975 Newsweek piece to deny climate change skeptics of using it as ammunition. Still, he had to change it because the science was wrong—and Gwynne admits that. He said that this field of study is always advancing. Yet, if you speak to these green warriors, the issue is settled. There is no more debate.

About what you would expect. Between the climate-change true believers, other Trump-hating partisan Democrats, and less political Americans who don’t know much about the Paris agreement but blindly favor what sounds like a cooperative status quo, you’d expect a majority opposed to withdrawal.

If there’s a surprise here, it’s the size of the Republican minority that also opposes withdrawal. GOPers split 67/25.

Opposition to Trump’s decision outpaces support for it by a roughly 2 to 1 margin, with 59 percent opposing the move and 28 percent in support. The reactions also break down sharply along partisan lines, though Republicans are not as united in support of the withdrawal as Democrats are in opposition of it. A 67 percent majority of Republicans support Trump’s action, but that drops to 22 percent among political independents and 8 percent of Democrats. Just over 6 in 10 independents and 8 in 10 Democrats oppose Trump’s action…

Beyond economic concerns, the Post-ABC poll finds 55 percent saying Trump’s decision will hurt U.S. leadership in the world, while 18 percent think it will help. Another 23 percent expect no impact. Even supporters of Trump’s action expressed mixed views on this question, with 48 percent saying Trump’s action will boost U.S. leadership, while 48 percent think it will make no difference or will harm the nation’s standing. Among those who oppose Trump’s decision, 77 percent say it will hurt American leadership.

That’s another X-factor. How many people who don’t have strong feelings about the Paris agreement on the merits are nonetheless wary of withdrawing because of the diplomatic fallout? The statistic most commonly cited by the media last week after Trump’s decision had nothing to do with temperatures or sea levels; it was the fact that only two countries in the world, Syria and Nicaragua, had declined to sign the accord. Europeans in particular have been howling at Trump for days over his decision. Americans may be fine in principle with dropping an agreement that does next to nothing to bind the signatories to meaningful emissions reductions while fearing that Trump’s middle finger to the world will come back to haunt him on other more important priorities.

That’s not to say, though, that Americans didn’t support the agreement in substance. If you believe this Yale survey from early last month, even Trump’s own voters backed Obama’s decision to join the agreement:

Note that this question also mentions how many other countries have joined the accord. Republicans may question the scientific consensus on climate change but they don’t seem to question as much the international consensus on whether collective action is needed. (Or at least they didn’t until Trump withdrew this week.) Overall, the public split 69/13 on whether the U.S. should participate in the agreement; Republicans split 51/26. In every single U.S. state, majorities were in favor. No one’s voting next year based on climate change but if Trump follows this with other bold anti-multilateralist moves, which seems like an increasingly distinct possibility, that could start o spook some voters. Americans have had 70 years’ worth of post-war coalition-building to shape their sense of the international status quo. A dramatic break will make even some apolitical voters nervous.

For an issue as supposedly dire as climate change, on which the entire American left moves in lockstep, it’s strange that the Sunday shows have to reach all the way back to Al Gore to be their lead counterpoint this morning to Trump’s Paris accord withdrawal. Right, right — he’s a former VP and party nominee and “An Inconvenient Truth” remains the most famous mass-culture example of climate-change agitation, but the film came out more than a decade ago and Gore hasn’t run for office in 17 years. How many millennials know who he is? (Then again, how many millennials watch the Sunday shows?) The Democratic Party, which has made this issue a part of its core creedal beliefs, hasn’t produced anyone in 10 years who’d be a more obvious environmental choice this morning than Manbearpig?

Oh well. Gore will be on “This Week,” “Meet the Press,” and “Fox News Sunday” — as will new EPA chief Scott Pruitt, making the White House’s case in defense of withdrawal. Whether he and Gore are planning to face off in the same segment (unlikely) or appear sequentially remains to be seen. Also on “Meet the Press” this morning to amplify Gore’s case: John Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris accord. MTP should have booked Hillary too and hit the trifecta of charisma-deprived recent Democratic presidential losers.

If you’re bored with global warming talk, the place to be is “Face the Nation,” which will focus on Russiagate and Trump’s nationalist turn on foreign policy with Mark Warner, Susan Collins, Nikki Haley, and Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO. The full line-up is at the AP.

At the moment I suppose I really only have one question for the office of our Ambassador to the United Nations. With no disrespect intended, Nikki Haley does know what Donald Trump looks like, right? I mean, I think she’s fantastic and is doing a great job for us all the way around, but is there any chance she’s been talking to somebody in Washington who has a similar build and hair color and she’s just thought that maybe he was the President?

I only ask because in an interview with Jake Tapper which will air tomorrow, Haley reportedly told him that Donald Trump absolutely believes that the climate is changing, that it’s at least partly driven by human activity and that the United States will be working to combat such changes. Could she be getting emails from Ivanka and just thinking they’re from her father? (CNN)

President Donald Trump does believe in climate change and that humans have a role in it, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview on “State of the Union.”

“President Trump believes the climate is changing and he believes pollutants are part of the equation,” Haley said Saturday, answering a central question in the wake of his decision to withdraw the country from the Paris climate accord.

Trump “knows that it’s changing and that the US has to be responsible for it and that’s what we’re going to do,” she continued, adding that withdrawing from the Paris agreement won’t change the country’s commitment to curbing climate change.

All kidding aside, if this were a one time thing we could write it off to some sort of miscommunication or misunderstanding, but this has been going on for a while now. Under the circumstances we’re back to playing the same game we’ve had to engage in on previous occasions. Does Nikki Haley know something about a new White House policy position which nobody else has been tipped off to yet? Has she talked to the President about it recently? Or is that just Nikki Haley’s position she’s sharing? If it’s the last possibility then something is seriously amiss because she’s specifically answering for the President here.

Parts of her statement could, of course, be at least similar in tone to what Trump will come out and say next. If they’re coordinating this he might say something along the lines of noting that the planet does seem to be getting warmer, but we’re not sure how fast or how big of an effect it has. He could just as easily add that human activity could be playing a role in that and there are things we can do (without Europe telling us how) to improve on emissions without bankrupting our businesses. If it’s something like that then they’ll look like they’re most on the same page. But it’s still going to be a lot different than when he used words like hoax and fraud. And if he’s not ready to say something like that this week then Haley will appear to have wandered off the ranch again.

The problem here is that in the aftermath of these missed connections, it’s Haley who winds up being dinged, not her boss. If President Trump has anything specifically different to say on any of those line items he can simply tell reporters, no, that’s not my position. I don’t know what she’s talking about. Then Haley is left with egg on her face. Of course, if the actual answer isn’t too far off they can play the Different Interpretation card easily enough. The interview is already in the can and being previewed, so the only mystery left is to guess when reporters will next get a chance to ask the President about it directly (assuming Sean Spicer is still doing a disappearing act) and how much he’s willing to modify his position on the subject.

Donald Trump wound up his first foreign tour by pushing off any decision on the Paris climate accord — to the consternation of the other G-7 members. After getting heavily lobbied to commit to the deal, Trump demurred, announcing on Twitter this morning that he’ll think about it for a while longer. The Italian prime minister serving as host to the meeting in Sicily issues a statement expressing frustration over the “open question” that prevented unity on the whole agenda:

The future of the United States’ involvement in the landmark agreement, which Trump repeatedly criticized as a candidate, was a sticking point at the Group of Seven summit in Italy that ended today, with the Italian prime minister pointing to it as an “open question” at the end of the summit’s first day on Friday.

“There is one open question, which is the U.S. position on the Paris climate accords. … All others have confirmed their total agreement on the accord,” Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said. “We are sure that after an internal reflection, the United States will also want to commit to it.”

Angela Merkel did not take the news well either, and offered a much less positive view of Trump’s position:

In remarks just now in Sicily, Merkel showed her frustration with Trump not committing to Paris climate deal pic.twitter.com/MTD7rI4PdH

During his campaign, Trump often scoffed at the theories of anthropogenic global warming, or “climate change” as it is now most often called, and actively opposed international commitments on CO2 emissions. He promised to unleash energy production in the US, and specifically pledged to protect the coal industry and its workers from hostile policies. Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator was an early sign that he planned to keep those promises, as well as a signal to what he thinks about the Paris accord. His lack of embrace of Europe’s position on the agreement hardly comes as a surprise.

But fear not, Europeans! Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn told the press that Trump’s opinion on Paris is “evolving,” and that he’s been impressed with the arguments from other European leaders:

Though the president has yet to make a final decision, his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, indicated Friday that the president was growing more attuned to the European stance on the issue.

“I think he is leaning to understand the European position,” Cohn said when asked which way the president was leaning. “Look, as you know from the U.S., there’s very strong views on both sides.”

According to ABC’s report, national security adviser H.R. McMaster felt obliged to intervene and assure reporters that Trump would act on the best interests of the US. However, Cohn’s remarks certainly caught the ear of Keith Koffler, who reminds readers of what “evolving” means:

Uh oh. You know what that means. When a president’s views are “evolving,” that means he feels he needs to take his time flip flopping so that it doesn’t look too much like he flip flopped.

You know, like George H.W. Bush’s views on abortion “evolved” so he could be Reagan’s vice president. And Barack Obama’s views on gay marriage “evolved” once he felt it wouldn’t keep him from winning elections. …

Somehow, I’m pretty sure his views are not evolving towards hating the Paris accords even more.

“If you think about how solar and how much wind power we’ve created in the United States, we can be a manufacturing powerhouse and still be environmentally friendly,” Cohn said.

Er … sure. That’s a startling statement from a close Trump adviser, but actions speak louder than someone else’s words, and Scott Pruitt didn’t go to the EPA to make coal passé. Besides, one doesn’t preclude the other — we can develop cleaner coal solutions and pursue innovation in renewables too.

Perhaps there is a simpler reason for all this evolution on the Paris accord, which is that it’s toothless. Unlike Kyoto, which tried for a legalistic top-down approach to enforcement, the Paris accord basically allows each nation to write its own rules, and then decide what enforcement and reporting will look like. The idea is that nations will compete to look super-greeny, and the laggards will get so ashamed of their foot-dragging that they’ll finally comply. There are some financial obligations, such as to provide a combined fund of $100 billion a year for “climate finance” between 2020 and 2025, but there are no real consequences for fudging. The biggest risk in the US might be court action that uses the Paris language to force the government to abide by its plan, but the accord is not a treaty and does not therefore have the full force of law within the US.

This toothlessness turns the main Kyoto problem on its head. The US Senate rejected Kyoto for a number of reasons, but mainly because rogue nations like China and India not only didn’t have comparable emission limits, there was no chance of them getting punished for violations. No one believes China reports honestly on the issue, and the killer smogs of Beijing pay testament to that lack of credibility. Instead of fixing that problem by imposing comparable limits and credible enforcement, the Paris accord just eliminates punishment entirely, adopting finger-wagging as the primary disincentive.

Trump may be evolving, but it might be an evolution to a position that the Paris accord isn’t worth the diplomatic headaches of opposition.

]]>3957510A new culprit for climate change is found, but it’s not of this Earthhttp://hotair.com/archives/2017/02/24/a-new-culprit-for-climate-change-is-found-but-its-not-of-this-earth/
Fri, 24 Feb 2017 13:01:13 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3945212Science is a terrible master

Since the media is all aflutter over proposed changes to the EPA and various climate-based regulations, we may as well visit (or revisit) the debate on climate change. Is it the result of activities of man or simply the normal patterns of changes in the Earth’s complicated biosphere? Some claim that it’s a combination of the two. But now, a team of astrophysicists has released new data which seems to support a decades-old theory which places the blame, shall we say, a bit further away. Since a picture is worth 1000 words, here’s a hint:

That’s right. The actual culprit for the repeated rise and fall of global temperatures might actually be Mars. That sort of thing is rather hard to square with our current debates but it all has to do with the “chaos” inherent in the orbits of the planets and how they interact with each other. The journal Nature broke the story this week and the details are contained in this release from the University of Wisconsin.

Using evidence from alternating layers of limestone and shale laid down over millions of years in a shallow North American seaway at the time dinosaurs held sway on Earth, the team led by UW–Madison Professor of Geoscience Stephen Meyers and Northwestern University Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Brad Sageman discovered the 87 million-year-old signature of a “resonance transition” between Mars and Earth. A resonance transition is the consequence of the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory. It plays on the idea that small changes in the initial conditions of a nonlinear system can have large effects over time.

In the context of the solar system, the phenomenon occurs when two orbiting bodies periodically tug at one another, as occurs when a planet in its track around the sun passes in relative proximity to another planet in its own orbit. These small but regular ticks in a planet’s orbit can exert big changes on the location and orientation of a planet on its axis relative to the sun and, accordingly, change the amount of solar radiation a planet receives over a given area. Where and how much solar radiation a planet gets is a key driver of climate.

This all seems to be based on the phenomena generally known as the “butterfly effect.” But in this case, it’s taken to a whole new, interplanetary level. The “chaos” of the orbits of our planet and Mars is something which is apparently both measurable and repeatable. I’ve had the chance to speak with a few science beat reporters over the past few years covering related subjects and am told that our understanding of orbits in the solar system continues to improve with each passing decade because of more accurate measuring technology. Observing the current positions and orbital patterns of the planets allows scientists to do something akin to “winding back the clock” to determine where Earth and Mars were at various points in the past. Our orbits may appear stable but they actually vary a considerable amount over time.

If this theory is correct it could explain the longer trend lines which geological data has hinted at in the past. Check out this frequently referenced chart of global temperature averages spanning the last half-million years or so.

I’ve always found myself wondering what accounted for those regularly spaced spikes in temperature followed by long periods of cooling. The obvious answer is that the mastodons had some sort of top-secret fracking program which Big Oil doesn’t want you to know about. But what if they actually correspond to the shifts in Earth’s orbit caused by our interaction with Mars (as they seem to)? This could definitely add a new wrinkle into the ongoing debate, though I’m under no illusion that this is going to satisfy everyone.

I remember reading this story a few days ago, thinking it was blogworthy, then ruling it out because the sourcing was simply too thin. One unnamed source says Ivanka Trump “wants to make climate change … one of her signature issues”? C’mon. How likely is that?

President-elect Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka is meeting on Monday with Al Gore — one of the most vocal advocates of fighting climate change.

Trump spokesman Jason Miller told reporters on a daily briefing call that the meeting would be about climate issues, but he did not know what specifically was on the agenda. He also said the former Democratic vice president would not meet with Trump himself…

Ivanka Trump is expected to take a policy role in her father’s presidency, and has supported ideas that are sometimes at odds with some Republican policy positions. During the campaign, Ivanka spoke in favor of a plan to support paid maternity leave and child care costs that became part of Trump’s platform.

This comes two weeks after dad told the New York Times that there may indeed be some “connectivity” between human activity and global warming and that he’s keeping an open mind on whether to keep the Paris climate accord in place. I guess we now know which influential Trump inner-circler to blame for that shift.

It’s not surprising that young urban liberal Ivanka Trump would want to pick Al Gore’s brain on his and the left’s pet issue. What’s surprising is that the transition team would announce it publicly. Why do that? Why didn’t she just call Gore? A showy meeting with him will only annoy right-wingers, and Trump himself usually doesn’t seem to care much about impressing the left, to his credit. Besides, Reince Priebus claimed just a week ago that Trump still sees climate change as mostly “a bunch of bunk.” The announcement feels less like something done at Trump’s behest than done at Ivanka’s behest, to signal to her political and social circles that she may be part of Team Trump but she’s not wavering in her own views. (The Politico story that claimed she wanted to make climate change her signature issue made a point of noting that she and her husband, Jared Kushner, took time during the campaign to attend an event in Aspen in September full of well-heeled bien-pensant liberals. She’s not breaking away from the old gang.) The Trumps are all about branding. Ivanka’s making sure her brand remains somewhat distinct from her father’s.

But maybe there’s more to it. The Politico piece wondered half-jokingly if she’d end up as Trump’s “climate czar.” The story itself, though, notes that she may end up as de facto First Lady, especially if it’s true that the low-key Melania Trump will end up spending much of her time in New York and out of the daily public eye. If someone’s going to play hostess at the White House and take the lead on championing FLOTUS-type causes — like climate-change “awareness” — Ivanka seems best suited given her visibility, her involvement with the campaign, and her political interests. Lo and behold, CNN is out with a story this morning noting that she and Kushner are moving to Washington D.C., in part because Kushner’s likely going to work as an advisor to Trump but possibly also to make it easier for Ivanka to have a role at the White House. And, uh, what about the fact that the more she participates in her father’s administration, the more conflict-of-interest problems it creates once she and her brothers take over the family business? That’s no problem either, as it turns out. The GOP simply doesn’t care about the president and his family using their offices to enrich themselves so long as the public doesn’t much seem to care either:

Indeed, the GOP is so easily dismissing Democratic threats of investigations and ethicists’ calls for divestment out of a belief that the political landscape has shifted. Voters rewarded Trump in part on the idea that success in business will equal success in government, and Republicans are therefore unwilling to encourage the president-elect to put distance between the Oval Office and Trump Tower, or between himself and the children who serve him as trusted advisers…

“The American people,” Gingrich added, “knowingly voted for a businessman whose name is inextricably tied to his fortune. … I’d say to the left wing, get over it.”

Go read the beginning of this piece about Ivanka sitting in on that Trump meeting with Shinzo Abe a few weeks ago while, at the same time, she was in the process of negotiating a licensing deal with a Japanese clothing company whose parent company has as its main shareholder a bank owned by the Japanese government. Think those photos released by the Japanese of her with Trump and Abe helped the deal any?

Exit question: Who’s the conservative voice in Trump’s inner circle? It’s obviously not Ivanka. Steve Bannon describes himself as a populist-nationalist. I … suppose we could call Reince Priebus a conservative, although I doubt you would have found many on either side of the conservative/nationalist divide willing to vouch for the head of the RNC before he was appointed chief of staff a few weeks ago. It was Reince’s shop, remember, that put out the “moar amnesty!” autopsy after Romney’s loss in 2012. The answer, I guess, is the same guy who recently said “the free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing … every time” and who weighed in with the following yesterday on ABC. Good luck with the new cap-and-trade regime, America.

We’ve been making jokes about this particular subject for years because it seems like such a perfect example of parody when it comes to climate change initiatives from the Left. If you want to cut down on methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere you should probably put corks in the butts of all the cows. Well… that will teach us to give liberals new ideas I suppose. California isn’t literally mandating corks, but it’s not far off from it. The Golden State will now be regulating “emissions” from cows. (Associated Press)

California is taking its fight against global warming to the farm.

The nation’s leading agricultural state is now targeting greenhouse gases produced by dairy cows and other livestock.

Despite strong opposition from farmers, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation in September that for the first time regulates heat-trapping gases from livestock operations and landfills.

Cattle and other farm animals are major sources of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping gas. Methane is released when they belch, pass gas and make manure.

There’s really not a scientific way to describe bovine belching, passing gas and producing manure which doesn’t immediately devolve to tenth grade locker room level. Yes folks, the cows are farting and pooping too much and that produces methane.

Since corks aren’t an option what do they propose the farmers do about it? They’ll be using “digesters” in order to comply with the regulations after they take effect in eight years. These are tanks where the manure can be deposited to decay, capturing the methane and burning it to create electricity. (At least in theory.) Here’s what one of those looks like and how it works. (Physics.org)

For most farms, manure is a pungent problem. At Homestead Dairy, it smells like money.

The family-run American farm invested in a biogas recovery system which transforms cow poo and other waste into electricity.

Enough electricity, in fact, to power 1,000 homes, a service which the local utility company pays for handsomely.

But that’s just a side benefit.

“It works economically, but one of the main reasons we did it was to try to help take care of the odor control for the neighbors,” said Floyd Houin, whose family has owned the farm in Plymouth, Indiana since 1945.

“The land’s important to us also because we produce a crop for feeding cows. So we want to do everything we can to take care of the land and the water. We drink the same water as everyone else.”

That all sounds great in theory, but California is not putting up sufficient money to put one of these digesters on every farm in the state. They’re not cheap, so that means what amounts to an unfunded mandate will wind up costing some of the farmers a ton of money at a time when milk prices remain low, there’s a massive drought making ranching difficult and profits are slim at best. And all of this negative impact on the entire dairy industry will go to reduce (not eliminate) the gaseous emissions from animals in one state. The total impact on the environment is probably too small to even be measured.

Where does that discussion about California seceding from the union stand again? It might be worth a second look.

This comes out of the same canceled-then-rescheduled meeting with the New York Times editorial board that Reince Priebus allegedly tried to sabotage this morning. Reince, it seems, had it in his head that hard questions from Times reporters might lead to problematic answers on the record.

Three people with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s initial decision to cancel the meeting said that Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, had been among those urging the president-elect to cancel it, because he would face questions he might not be prepared to answer. It was Mr. Priebus who relayed to Mr. Trump, erroneously, that The Times had changed the conditions of the meeting, believing it would result in a cancellation, these people said.

Was Reince right to worry? Here’s what happened during the climate-change part of the Q&A, according to Times reporter Michael Grynbaum. (A full transcript will be available later, I’m sure, but for the moment this will have to do.)

Tom Friedman asks if Trump will withdraw from climate change accords. Trump: “I’m looking at it very closely. I have an open mind to it."

It could be that he’s just being prudential. There’s no sense binding himself to a position on a major issue, campaign promise or no, before he’s been fully briefed and his cabinet’s debated it. Same goes for the Iran nuclear deal, which he’s also promised to abandon in the past but has been coy about lately. He’s going to take his time before committing to a major unilateral move, particularly one that’ll anger American allies. Another possibility: The guy loves good press and enjoys pleasing his audience, and he knows what an audience of New York Times editors wants to hear about climate change. He couldn’t resist pandering to them. Put him back in front of an arena of 10,000 screaming fans and he’ll say something different. A third possibility is that Barack Obama’s been chatting with him about this and getting him to reconsider. An intriguing tidbit from the Times’s account of today’s interview:

Mr. Trump reiterated that he had a good meeting at the White House with President Obama after the election. He noted that the president had discussed with him a series of problems in the world, including one particularly challenging one that Mr. Trump refused to disclose.

Could that “particularly challenging” problem have been climate change? That’s how the left usually describes it — the crisis of our age, staggering in its complexity and the collective-action problems it presents. And it makes sense that Trump wouldn’t want his conservative fan base to know that he and O have been discussing it. And then, of course, there’s the possibility that Trump’s own views of climate change are more conflicted than his “tear up the Paris accord” boasting on the trail suggested. (Does Trump have views on any subject that aren’t conflicted?) WaPo notes that he hasn’t always flatly denied a relationship between human activity and global warming, and he signed a letter in 2009 calling for renewed effort to build a “clean-energy economy.”

A more interesting question may be how many of Trump’s closest advisors believe global warming is a major problem. Rudy Giuliani, who’s in line to be his top diplomat and would be a point man on renegotiating the Paris accord, said during his own presidential run in 2007 that he thinks human beings are contributing to climate change. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner seem every inch the rich, urban, socially-conscious socialites who’d regard global warming as an important issue. But many other Trump advisors, starting with Mike Pence, are skeptics. As a matter of basic retail politics, climate change is enough of a “leftist” issue that Trump would inevitably lose some political capital on the right if he stuck with Obama’s accord, and it would increase pressure on him to break with Obama’s policies in other diplomatic matters like the Iran deal. He’s going to have to pick his spots in betraying his base. Especially when energy-sector jobs are at stake.

I didn’t hear Rush’s show today but I did notice this on Twitter. If anyone has the audio of him talking about Trump on climate change, send it along and I’ll post.

Listening to Rush as I drive in Red State: He's not sure what to make of Trump. Climate change more troubling than not going after Clinton.

]]>3932999A group of children are being allowed to sue the U.S. government. Can you guess why?http://hotair.com/archives/2016/11/15/a-group-of-children-are-being-allowed-to-sue-the-u-s-government-can-you-guess-why/
Wed, 16 Nov 2016 03:01:56 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3932033Three guesses and the first two don't count

This was a story which first popped up a week ago, but I’d originally assumed it was an article from The Onion. Hey, who knew? Turns out it’s real. CNN covered it last Friday and it deals with a group of mostly children (plaintiffs ranging in age from 9-20) who are suing the United States government because… (drum roll) climate change is threatening their future. The interesting aspect of their coverage was that they assumed that this was going to be a problem for Donald Trump.

President-elect Donald Trump is likely to find himself the subject of a federal court case next year. The subject: climate change. And the plaintiffs: 21 children who want to ensure they have the right to a livable atmosphere.

The kid plaintiffs, ages 9 to 20, allege the federal government is doing far too little to keep dangerous global warming in check, and is actually creating warming by leasing federal property for fossil fuel extraction.The basic idea is that politicians have failed to fix the climate crisis.So the courts need to force them to do so.

I’m not sure who put these kids up to this but the approach is almost a sure fire winner for whoever thought of it. It doesn’t even matter if the suit actually succeeds because it’s got all the catnip required to be a huge hit with the media. Anything with kids “taking on the system” is a ratings grabber and when you toss in their insistence that America stop using fossil fuels (which is a major concern for most nine year olds I’m sure) it’s a left leaning media dream script.

The real bonus, however, was that it was released just after the election so CNN obviously assumed it would land in Donald Trump’s lap. That’s just bonus gravy on the dish right there. But as it turns out, one lefty, environmentalist site dug further into the details and the actual defendant in the case won’t be quite as popular with the media. (Treehugger.com, emphasis added)

According to Motherboard, the lawsuit, which is being spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust, a civic engagement nonprofit for youth, charges President Obama, the fossil fuel industry, and other federal agencies for violating the plantiffs’ constitutional right to life, liberty, property, and to vital public trust resources, by continuing to use fossil fuels.

The lawsuit was filed in September 2015, and is supported by noted climate scientist James Hansen, who is a co-plaintiff in the case, as guardian for his granddaughter and for future generations. Since last year, lawyers for the defendants from various governmental organizations have attempted to get the case dismissed on various grounds, including the question of whether minors can defend their constitutional rights like adults, as well as asserting that climate change is not caused by humans.

Naming President Obama in the suit is probably the cherry on top of this highly amusing cake. As to the merit of the suit itself there is little to be said. I’m not talking about a question of whether or not children can be allowed to bring a suit. Assuming they have the permission of a parent or guardian (who no doubt put them up to it) or are emancipated, they clearly could. The larger issue is whether or not there is any merit in the suit itself. Even if you believe that climate change is 100% anthropogenic in nature, holding one group of people currently in charge of government policy accountable for the entire process is absurd. Expand that idea to include the fact that other countries are far worse contributors to pollution of all kinds and any economically feasible reductions by our nation would never offset them and you have a case which no reasonable jury would entertain.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this case will never go anywhere. But someone saw fit to allow it to move forward and the anti-energy media will have a field day with it during the slow, post-election news cycle.

]]>3932033How a London university pocketed millions by faking global warming studieshttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/10/25/london-university-pocketed-millions-faking-global-warming-studies/
Tue, 25 Oct 2016 15:31:43 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3928582Good work if you can get it

This story takes place across the pond but it shines a light on some of the current state of “research” in the climate studies field. The Daily Caller has a fascinating report on the University of London and the expensive process they engaged in when commissioning research papers and scholarly work on global warming. The university’s Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) was tasked by the government with providing such educational material for use by Parliament and they delivered it at a hefty price tag to the taxpayers. The only problem is that a lot of the research in question wasn’t even done by them.

A global warming research center at the London School of Economics got millions of dollars from UK taxpayers by taking credit for research it didn’t perform, an investigation by The Daily Mail revealed.

The UK government gave $11 million dollars to the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) in exchange for research that the organization reportedly never actually did.

Many papers CCCEP claimed to have published to get government money weren’t about global warming, were written before the organization was even founded, or were written by researchers unaffiliated with CCCEP. The government never checked CCCEP’s supposed publication lists, saying they were “taken on trust,” according to the report.

Some of the researchers who actually did the work were never even informed that CCEP was repackaging and releasing the studies for profit and they were furious about it. Others seemed to be engaged in research which wasn’t even directly related to the subject ostensibly under study.

A second question arises in the reliability of research material which is generated for payment rather than studies which arise from independent academic studies. That happens in the United States as well, with the EPA paying researchers for studies which seem designed to support a particular conclusion before they even begin. As the DC notes, this leads to situations such as we saw when the agency was looking for material to support the need for carbon reduction. That led to a multi-million dollar payday for one scientist.

Recent studies in the U.S. — which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses to support the scientific case for its Clean Power Plan — saw the agency give $31.2 million, $9.5 million, and $3.65 million in public funds to lead authors, according to EPA public disclosures.

The author who received $3.65 million, Charles Driscoll, even admitted to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the result of his study was predetermined, saying “in doing this study we wanted to bring attention to the additional benefits from carbon controls.”

$16M may not sound like a lot of money in terms of the total federal budget, but the EPA certainly is generous with your tax dollars when it wants to support new regulations on the energy industry. They rely on scientific papers to make their point, but investigations such as this one have to leave us wondering just how much of it is independent work of merit and how much is simply public relations material. If you ever want to get a sense of how much scientific research is being bought and sold with dubious contents, spend some time browsing through the website Retraction Watch. They monitor peer reviewed papers from around the world on all manner of subjects which wind up being yanked after the authors are discredited. There have been nonsense papers – some generated by computer algorithms – published and paid for in virtually every field. And climate science is no exception to that rule.

The jokes pretty much write themselves since there doesn’t seem to be any imminent danger to life and limb. The ship named Polar Ocean Challenge is in the process of demonstrating the real world effects of global warming by navigating the northeast and northwest passages above Canada, Europe and Asia. It’s a big project to undertake, particularly when you consider the lengthy history of human exploration which once sought that mythical northwest passage from Europe to India. (Sadly, quite a few people died in the attempt.)

But now that global warming has cleared the path, the dream can finally be realized. Except for one small problem… the sea ice is still there and it stopped them in their tracks. (Daily Caller)

A group of adventurers, sailors, pilots and climate scientists that recently started a journey around the North Pole in an effort to show the lack of ice, has been blocked from further travels by ice.

The Polar Ocean Challenge is taking a two month journey that will see them go from Bristol, Alaska, to Norway, then to Russia through the North East passage, back to Alaska through the North West passage, to Greenland and then ultimately back to Bristol. Their objective, as laid out by their website, was to demonstrate “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.”

There has been one small hiccup thus-far though: they are currently stuck in Murmansk, Russia because there is too much ice blocking the North East passage the team said didn’t exist in summer months, according to Real Climate Science.

Curiously enough, this isn’t the first time this has happened. The Polar Ocean Challenge was trying it in the Arctic because this is when it’s summer in the northern hemisphere. But back in January of 2014, 52 people had to be rescued from a ship stuck in the Antarctic ice on the other end of the globe. You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of that CNN article to discover that Chris Turney, the expedition leader, is also a climate scientist. On his personal website, however, the professor apparently went into more detail. CNN simply summed it up by saying, “Turney’s expedition to gauge the effects of climate change on the region began on November 27. ”

That’s not to say that there isn’t less ice now than there was in the 15th and 16th centuries when we were originally poking around. There’s definitely less, at least during some years. Then again, there were also times when there wasn’t a bit of ice on the entire planet. (Likely a result of that secret fracking program the dinosaurs were running which we just haven’t unearthed yet.) We’ve also had at least one and possibly three periods which scientists refer to as “snowball Earth” when the entire planet froze over and life hung on by a thread in the cracks between the ice.

So be of good cheer, sailors. If you wait around long enough you’ll be able to make that trip sooner or later.

A group of mostly Democratic Attorneys General, led by a political activist from the Virgin Islands, has launched a partisan witch hunt focused on Exxon Mobil which takes the idea of abuse of government power to a new level. A raft of subpoenas was issued recently demanding four decades worth of documents from the energy giant without even the suggestion that any laws had been broken, but rather to find out if they were “complicit” in public criticism of government policies which are supposedly aimed at combating climate change. (National Review)

On March 29, a group of mainly Democratic attorneys general announced at a press conference (with former vice president and green-energy profiteer Al Gore in attendance) that they would seek to transform U.S. policy on climate change by “creatively” and “aggressively” deploying their prosecutorial powers. That, in and of itself, should raise an entire May Day parade’s worth of red flags: Prosecutors are in the business of enforcing the law, not rewriting it, and the open, naked promise to use prosecutorial powers as a political weapon is a prima facie abuse of office. In a self-respecting society, every one of those state attorneys general would have been impeached the next day. But this is the Age of Obama, not the Age of Self-Respect.

Claude Earl Walker, the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Island, who promised a “transformational” use of his prosecutorial powers in the global-warming crusade, shortly thereafter issued a subpoena to Exxon, demanding private communication and other internal information as part of an investigation into the firm. Walker has not come even close to describing any crime committed by Exxon, much less a crime committed by Exxon in his jurisdiction, the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Exxon does no business, holds no assets, maintains no employees, and has no physical presence. Again, this is, in and of itself, a grotesque abuse of power.

In addition to having Al Gore on hand there were numerous environment groups cheering on this direct attack on the energy industry. That might explain the rather curious list of other groups who were also caught up in the net of Earl Walker’s subpoena festival. Where did he get the names of his prospective targets? It turns out that it’s suspiciously close to a nearly identical list of “bad guys” who show up on the website of Greenpeace. (Washington Times)

When deciding which organizations to target in his probe into climate change dissent, Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude E. Walker apparently received some help from Greenpeace.

Of the roughly 100 academic institutions and free market think tanks named in Mr. Walker’s subpoena of Exxon Mobil, 69 are listed on Greenpeace’s #ExxonSecrets website — and in virtually the same order.

The obvious overlap between the Greenpeace site and the March 15 subpoena, an unredacted copy of which was obtained Tuesday by The Washington Times, was but one of the points made Wednesday by those named in the document.

New York’s Attorney General started making noises about this same tactic last year, but this new Democrat coalition is really taking it to the next level. The job of our Attorneys General is to investigate and prosecute crimes. In this case, there has been no allegation of any violation of the law. This is a fishing expedition intended to find out if there was any sort of “collusion” between groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (who have been frequent critics of climate change activism) and Exxon. But to what end? Let’s just say that the fever dreams of Greenpeace are actually true and energy companies were providing data and analysis on this subject to think tanks who comment on it in public. So what? These are companies who are on the cutting edge of science in these fields and would be natural choices to contact for research material.

Unless these activists can provide some indication that a crime has taken place, these subpoenas are a blatant abuse of government power and an attempt to intimidate an industry which is politically unpopular on the left. And this needs to stop immediately.

]]>3905419Don’t look now but the Earth is getting greenerhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/27/dont-look-now-but-the-earth-is-getting-greener/
Wed, 27 Apr 2016 16:01:07 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3902804Green is the new brown

Since both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sander are quite keen to talk about climate change and carbon taxes, let’s take a brief break from the campaign trail and check in on how Mother Gaia is doing these days. We’ve recorded what some climate scientists claim is a string of record warmest months over the past year and if I were judging by the almost snow-free, mild winter we just enjoyed in upstate New York and the rest of the northeast (watch out for the bears) I’d have to agree. So I assume this means we’re all doomed. But oddly enough, though you’d think that hotter temperatures would be turning the planet into a desert, the Earth is responding rather strangely by increasing the amount of vegetation covering the globe as levels of carbon dioxide increase. (Yahoo)

A new climate change study seems to suggest that a rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions has helped plants propagate around the planet. The findings see contrarians (aka climate change skeptics) reasserting their claim that additional CO2 is beneficial for the planet, since foliage harness these emissions for growth. But the researchers behind the study, Greening of the Earth and its Drivers, insist the extra emissions and subsequent “fertilization effect” are more likely signs of a troubled system struggling to adjust.

A tremendous amount of vegetated land has experienced greening, according to satellite data collected and analyzed by 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries. The new greenery is equivalent to more than four billion giant sequoias. If all the extra leaves were laid flat, they’d cover the continental United States – twice! Added CO2 accounts for 70 percent of that growth, with climate change, increased nitrogen, and changes in land management accounting for fractions each. Despite global temperatures reaching a record high last year, only four percent of the world’s vegetated land has experienced depletion.

Climate alarmists are quick to poo-poo the results and you get a lot of that in the linked article. It seems that any news can be spun for good or for ill when it comes to this subject, but the one point of general agreement appears to be that nobody saw this coming. I’m not sure why, since plants operate on carbon dioxide and when there’s more of it in the air they probably thrive. (But then, I’m not a biologist and I don’t even play one on TV.) Throughout the history of the planet it’s believed that when there’s more oxygen, the animals do better and grow larger. (Sometimes ridiculously so.) So is it so crazy to think that plants would do better when the reverse is true?

Perhaps more to the point is the question of what all this new greenery is doing to the temperature cycle. I’ve heard a few scientists in nature documentaries speak of the planet’s natural tendency to self-regulate when conditions run toward extremes. Arid regions tend to expand in high temperatures through a process known as desertification, with dead zones growing as the region grows hotter. But green, lush terrain doesn’t soak up and radiate heat as well, so it tends to cool the regions with many plants. If increased carbon dioxide levels lead to this type of massive growth in plant cover, wouldn’t that tend to reduce temperatures over time?

As I said, I’m not a scientist so I’m just tossing out some questions here. We seem to get quite a few things wrong about the planet over the long run and the biosphere continues to surprise us. (When I was in school, Time Magazine was predicting that we’d be entering a new ice age by now.) Perhaps we don’t have everything figured out quite as well as we thought.

[Editor’s note: The original version of this article cited NASA as the source of the study as per the source material. They have since edited this to cite authorship of the study to NOAA. This change is made throughout the article.)

Is there anyone at the EPA who has even the foggiest idea how any of this works?

On the heels of their carbon and mercury emissions limits which are already tied up in court, the EPA announced this week that they will double down on their incredible record of success (/sarc) and roll out some new methane regulations. The restrictions will apply to all oil and gas wells in the country, despite the industry already having massively reduced extraneous emissions at well sites. The timing turned out to be rather unfortunate for the agency however and set them up for some serious embarrassment. Only one day after the announcement, NOAA release another long anticipated study which sought to identify the source of methane in the atmosphere. The results were rather stark and won’t make Gina McCarthy very happy. (Energy Indepth)

Just one day after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it will regulate methane emissions from existing sources of oil and natural gas in order to “combat climate change,” scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have released a new study finding that oil and natural gas producers are not to blame for a global increase in methane emissions. In fact, according to the researchers, the increased emissions are instead coming from wetlands and agriculture.

The lead author of the study, Hinrich Schaefer, an atmospheric scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Wellington, New Zealand, put it this way to Climatewire:

“Currently increasing methane levels are caused not by fossil fuel production but rather by wetlands or, more likely, agriculture.”

The linked study shows that there has been a significant increase in “unconventional” energy extraction (primarily fracking) but their overall contributions to global increases in methane levels are negligible at best. Of course, we’ve written about that here before, though nobody at the EPA seems to be reading it. The energy industry didn’t need anyone to tell them to reduce methane leakage at drill sites. Why? Because it’s a primary component of natural gas. In case that’s not sinking in yet… it’s the stuff they are drilling for. When they let it slip out into the atmosphere that’s literally money going up in smoke.

Naysayers will no doubt be quick to raise questions and ask how on Earth these eggheads could know where the methane is coming from. Well, for the party that claims to love science, perhaps they could listen to the scientists for a change. We can “fingerprint” the gasses in the atmosphere now (hint: that’s one reason NOAA is involved) and there are actually different types of methane. Thermogenic methane is released from industrial, energy extraction activity. Biogenic methane occurs naturally and is released due to agricultural activity and the melting of typically frozen ground, widely across eastern Europe and western Asia. Thermogenic methane emissions stopped going up in the 90s and haven’t resumed since. It’s the biogenic methane that’s been on the rise.

I’m sure that won’t let Gina McCarthy stop her, though. What good is having an EPA if you can’t keep slapping new regulations on some of the nation’s biggest job creators?

Clearly human driven climate change and anthropogenic global warming can not be defeated through political action alone. A challenge this monumental will call for more strident measures. With that in mind, the Obama administration has apparently decided to bring in the big guns… literally. The Pentagon has been ordered to “address climate change.” (Free Beacon)

A new directive issued by Pentagon leaders mandates that the agency work to “assess and manage risks associated with the impacts of climate change,” according to a copy of the Jan. 14 directive issued by Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work.

As the Obama administration focuses on a larger effort to push its climate change agenda, the Pentagon will now “address the impacts of climate change.” This includes engaging in “deliberate preparation, close cooperation, and coordinated planning” to “improve climate preparedness and resilience,” according to the directive.

The partnership will include state governments and the private sector.

I’m not even sure what this is supposed to mean. Are we attacking polar bears with drones? The directive goes on to state that the Department of Defense must adapt current and future operations to address the impacts of climate change in order to maintain an effective and efficient U.S. military. Is there some sort of pamphlet or handbook that goes along with this, possibly providing specific instructions? They’re being told to prepare for altered operating environments related to climate change. I suppose the Navy would like to know if any of the channels will be deeper or if any coastal bases are underwater, but beyond that I’m drawing a blank.

Or perhaps they’re supposed to be doing more to lessen their impact on climate change. That might be it. But you may recall that we already experimented with navy vessels running on biofuels to reduce our carbon footprint. The result was that the ships cost a massive amount more to operate without any noticeable benefit. They wouldn’t try something like that again, would they?

The Navy is launching a carrier strike group to be powered partly by biofuel, calling it a milestone toward easing the military’s reliance on foreign oil.

The maritime branch is touting the warships as the centerpiece of its “Great Green Fleet.” Most of the group’s ships will be run for now on a mix of 90 percent petroleum and only 10 percent biofuels, though that could change in the future. The Navy originally aimed for a 50-50 ratio.

On Wednesday, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack stood on a pier at the North Island naval base in San Diego Bay where the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Stennis and the guided-missile destroyer USS Stockdale were preparing for a seven-month deployment. The Stockdale will be the first Navy ship to regularly run on alternative fuel.

You can go ahead and vote me off the island now, thanks. I think I’m done playing.

The Paris climate talks have mostly wound to an end. There are still a few details to clean up over the weekend, but we’re being told that representatives from hundreds of nations have come together and are prepared to release their final agreement on how to save the world from climate change. Or maybe not: even as of this morning nobody seemed to be able to agree as to whether or not there was an agreement. (CNN)

“Obviously, nobody will get 100% of what they want,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Friday as he discussed the “balanced and as ambitious as possible” working document that will be voted on. “What I hope is that everyone remembers the message of the first day, when 150 heads of state and government came from all around the world to say, ‘The world needs a success.’ ”

Countries must agree by consensus. Organizers hope countries will adopt the proposal but there could be some nations that don’t go along. It will be up to the COP21 president to decide whether there’s an agreement.

After the vote in Paris, the countries that adopt the agreement will later have to ratify it nationally.

Still, there are specific goals coming out. Exactly how they plan on meeting them remains a mystery (at least in the fine details) but they supposedly will be releasing their target goals for all the nations to meet. Chief among these is the plan to hold the global temperature rise to less than two degrees Celsius over the rest of the century. (The Independent)

Ministers from more than 190 countries are expected to ratify a major new international climate change agreement – the details of which were announced at around 10:30am GMT (11:30am CET).

The final agreement would include a commitment to keeping temperature rises “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels with a target of keeping them at 1.5C. Ministers are meeting on Saturday afternoon to decide whether or not to approve the agreement.

Announcing the deal, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said the potential deal aimed to show: “Our collective efforts are worth more than the sum of our individual efforts.”

The steps required to achieve such a lofty goal do, at least in general, appear to have nearly universal agreement among the people attending and voting. The world, we are told, will have to start seriously weaning itself off of all fossil fuels by 2050 and abandon them entirely by the end of the century. Those who can’t figure out a way to do that will need to engage in ruinously expensive methods of “burying” their carbon output and also filtering it out of the air in mass quantities. (Good luck getting China, Russia or India to actually go along with any of this beyond paying it simple lip service, by the way.)

Despite fears in some quarters that the conference’s final findings will be legally binding around the world, it’s really nothing of the sort. They can make all the “rules” they like, but absent some means of enforcement they really have nothing to say to sovereign nations whose governments don’t independently agree to go along. There’s already historical precedent for that, since Bill Clinton initially signed off on the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 but it was then rejected under G.W. Bush in 2001 and we never became an official signatory. A plan that essentially guts the oil and gas industry with no practical replacement for the energy on the horizon is never going to see the light of day in Congress. (Unless the world is now several orders of magnitude more insane than it even seems to be today.)

We’ll revisit this when the final details get a vote and everyone has a chance to look them over, but I expect this to primarily be a political bone for our presidential candidates to chew over next year. In terms of actual policy, I wouldn’t worry too much at this point.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/12/paris-climate-talks-unveil-final-solution-hope-everyone-enjoys-living-in-caves/feed/2093887115Scientists cheering for NOAA chief to not be “bullied” into showing their work on climate datahttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/11/scientists-cheering-for-noaa-chief-to-not-be-bullied-into-showing-their-work-on-climate-data/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/11/scientists-cheering-for-noaa-chief-to-not-be-bullied-into-showing-their-work-on-climate-data/#commentsFri, 11 Dec 2015 17:01:16 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3887014Don't be pushed around by pesky people who want to see your data

This is supposed to be my day off, but I keep getting dragged back to a story from earlier this week that we really haven’t had time to tackle thus far. It deals with that highly controversial NOAA study from June of this year which purported to “debunk” the idea that global warming has gone into a pause, or even receded a bit during this decade. Once the study was released, a number of members of Congress, led by Lamar Smith, (R-TX 21) asked NOAA chief Kathryn Sullivan to come discuss the issue. Among the requests being made is an order to see the minutes of the deliberations of the various scientists involved and for their data to be put up for public scrutiny. Amazingly, Sullivan has thus far flatly refused to show their work, and now a coalition of other scientists have signed a letter of endorsement, calling on her to bravely avoid being “bullied” by Congress. (Washington Post)

Scientists keep rallying behind Kathryn Sullivan, the federal official on one side of a two-month standoff with a senior House Republican over a groundbreaking climate change study.

On Monday, the chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration received a letter signed by 587 individual scientists from chemists to biologists urging to hold her ground against House science committee Chairman Lamar Smith’s campaign to discredit NOAA scientists. It follows a letter last month signed by seven scientific organizations representing hundreds of thousands of researchers warning that his efforts are “establishing a practice of inquests”that will have a chilling effect…

“We urge you to continue to stand firm against these bullying tactics in order to protect NOAA scientists’ ability to pursue research and publish data and results regardless of how contentious the issue may be,” wrote the scientists, members of the Science Network of the Union of Concerned Scientists , a nonprofit science advocacy group.

There are actually a couple of different, jaw dropping items in this story which seem mystifying even in comparison to the normal comings and goings in the morass of the federal government. From the strictly good government side of the equation, NOAA is a public entity which is primarily funded by the taxpayers. (And they’ve been caught playing fast and loose with your cash on more than one occasion.) The idea that Congress doesn’t have complete authority to engage in oversight of their work should be offensive to everyone in the country.

But on a far more basic level, we’re talking about the scientific process here. Since when is the process for critically examining data and arriving at substantive conclusions some sort of clandestine, secret process? We’re not talking about an agency that’s guarding sensitive national security secrets. This is allegedly science. The entire concept of solid research involves extensive peer reviews where other experts can put your theories and conclusions to the test and see if they can either replicate or repudiate your results. What do these scientists have to hide from the public even if they weren’t being funded on the taxpayer’s dime?

This refusal is a breach of trust with the public. Personally, I think that Congress needs to do a lot more than drag Sullivan out on the floor to demand answers… she needs to be fired. This is an abuse of her office and further diminishes any sense of trust the public should have in her work.

The original article incorrectly referenced Lamar Smith rather than Kathryn Sullivan in the text.

Obama’s war on coal has hit communities hard. We all know that. In fact, there is “visceral disgust” for Obama’s environmental policies in the Appalachian counties that have long-supported Democrats since the New Deal. The shift towards the Republican Party was seen in Kentucky when Mitch McConnell easily won re-election over Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes last year. McConnell was able to outperform his 2008 numbers in these coal counties, which contributed to his landslide victory. That trend continued when Matt Bevin, McConnell’s 2014 primary challenger, was elected governor earlier this month, becoming the second Republican to hold that office in four decades.

West Virginia, another coal-producing state, has also gone solidly Republican after decades of being a Democratic bastion. Their energy costs are expected to go up 40 percent under Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), which sets to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. It’s a regulatory nightmare, a job killer, and a policy that Hillary Clinton plans to continue if she’s elected. But have no fear coal counties; she plans to set aside $30 billion to help these people after she supported polices that have killed off the means in which they make a living.

The American Action Forum has crunched the numbers for the butcher’s bill for coal. The power plant provisions alone will gut 125,800 jobs and the total GDP loss over a ten-year period is $650 billon [emphasis AAF]:

The final rule for the Clean Power Plan (CPP) was released by the Obama Administration this past August and is a direct attack on the coal industry…the final plan, supported by Sec. Clinton, will shutter 66 power plants and eliminate 125,800 jobs in the coal industry. All of these figures are based on EPA data. The same study shows that using the 2012 baseline for coal generation and projections for 2030 output, the industry could shrink by 48 percent.

[…]

If 125,800 of these jobs are cut, wages lost will be over $9.8 billion dollars per year. The one-time $30 billion relief fund is a drop in the bucket and unless another industry picks up the slack that means over $90 billion in lost wages over the next 10 years.

[…]

The coal industry contributes nearly $65.7 billion to national GDP. As [sic] evidenced by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, the U.S. is not in a place to lose that type of contribution. Over 10 years, the U.S. will see a loss of over $650 billion dollars.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board added that unemployment in coal-producing eastern Kentucky is over 8 percent, it’s in double-digits in southern West Virginia, and coal production has decreased 15 percent since 2008, with the loss of 50,000 jobs between 2008-2012. They noted that the shale boom has contributed to this decline, but the Obama Environmental Protection Agency’s CPP policy will deliver the deathblow to the industry, along with the notion that it will needlessly destroy American jobs over the non-threat of global warming:

To make up for the job losses, there’s money for high-speed broadband, roads, bridges, water systems, airports, public health centers and renewable energy. Her plan also includes tax credits for investors, funding for arts and culture programs, as well as local food and agriculture businesses.

Her political goal is to staunch Democrats’ leaking support among blue-collar communities. Last week Republicans took the Kentucky governorship for only the second time in 44 years. In 2014 the GOP picked up Senate seats in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Iowa, Colorado, West Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota and came close in Virginia. Next year Republicans are defending Senate seats in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois—states President Obama won in 2012 but save for the Land of Lincoln may be in play in the presidential election.

So here we have the progressive policy arc made clear: First destroy coal jobs to please affluent liberals over climate change, then tax all Americans more to buy the support of the workers who had those jobs. How about not destroying the jobs in the first place?

You’re not supposed to burn any coal or oil. You should probably avoid natural gas too, since it’s composed of hydrocarbons. Don’t drive your car unless it’s one of those battery powered ones that hasn’t caught fire yet. Get rid of those incandescent light bulbs all over your house. Clean all the steak and ground beef out of your fridge because cows are too flatulent. Have you checked all of these off your list? Good. Then you are finally doing your part and helping to end global warming.

EPA Chief Gina McCarthy wants the world to stop using hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in air conditioners and other consumers products as part of President Barack Obama’s plan to fight global warming.

McCarthy is so determined to make this happen, she’s taking the lead role at an ongoing United Nations summit to expand the current global treaty covering ozone-depleting substances. The EPA chief hopes that her agency’s recent HFC regulations will convince other countries to join the U.S. in limiting the chemicals…

Maybe it’s just me, but the same moment you’re telling everyone how much warmer it’s getting might not be the best time to take away their air conditioner. But leaving that aside for the moment, I’m not sure why McCarthy is invoking the Montreal Protocol here since it was put in place to protect the ozone layer. Hydrofluorocarbons don’t impact the ozone layer to my knowledge. There have been plans in the works for a while to replace these substances in air conditioning but you’re looking at moving to ammonia or dimethyl ether or one of a few other options. That’s not only an expensive switch, but the cooling efficiency goes down.

How do we deal with the issue of the moving targets being presented by the environmental warriors? I thought carbon dioxide was the big concern, even though the people going after power plants are looking at small ball goals when you consider that most of it is coming out of automobile exhausts. (Sadly for them, nobody supports you when you say you want to take away their cars.) And now it’s the coolant in our air conditioners. What’s next?

For the next twelve months you can expect to hear a lot about anthropogenic global warming. It will no doubt be a huge feature when Rachel Maddow invites all of the Democrat presidential candidates to sit down for an evening of something which we absolutely won’t call a debate. With that in mind, she’ll have plenty of research to do but she might not want to go to the headlines at Yahoo News. I was flipping through them this morning as I usually do and found two back to back stories which should make everything as clear as mud.

Melting ice in West Antarctica is a major concern for global sea levels, and a key area may already be unstable enough to unleash three meters of ocean rise, scientists said Monday.

The study follows research out last year, led by NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot, warning that ice in the Antarctic had gone into a state of irreversible retreat, that the melting was considered “unstoppable” and could raise sea level by 1.2 meters (four feet).

Well, now that we know the world is ending we may as well break out the tequila shooters and party like the apocalypse is at hand. We’ve hit the point of no return, so you’d best start investing in beach front property in West Virginia if you want to find a way to capitalize on this. But wait! No sooner had I finished reading that article than this one popped up right below it. Antarctica is Gaining Ice.

A NASA study finds Antarctica is actually gaining ice cover despite global warming. A study released last week used satellite data to determine the continent’s ice sheet gained 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001, slowing to 82 billion tons from 2003 to 2008.

The gains are in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica although losses have been registered on the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island regions of West Antarctica, said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study published Friday in the Journal of Glaciology.

But… wait. That other guy just said… um…

This is clearly too complicated for me. Perhaps Rachel and I should just turn it over to somebody who observes the climate and reports on it for a living. One example might be Philippe Verdier, a meteorologist with French state run television. Philippe not only covers the subject extensively, but he recently published a book in which he questions some of the assumptions made by the global warming community and breaks down some of the data. Let’s just put in a call to his office this morning and see if he can’t clear things up for us.

A weather forecaster for French state television has been fired after releasing and promoting a book criticizing politicians, scientists and others for what he calls an exaggerated view of climate change.

Philippe Verdier’s dismissal from France-2 comes a month before Paris hosts a U.N. conference aimed at the most ambitious worldwide agreement yet to limit global warming. He announced the dismissal in an online video over the weekend in which he described it as an attack on media freedom.

Sometimes the more noble path in science of any kind is to admit that you’ve got a theory you’re working on while others have their own theories, and you’re gathering data as best you can but you simply aren’t entirely sure what’s going on yet. It’s a big planet with an intensely complicated climate which is too big to fully model on any computer. I hope we keep working on quantifying it all but we don’t seem to be quite there yet.

Bill Gates doesn’t think free markets will solve climate change and move the world into more of a fossil fuel free fairyland. He’s more interested in seeing how the government can push private businesses into alternative energy, tellingThe Atlantic the free market won’t move fast enough.

Well, there’s no fortune to be made…Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.

Gates get more alarmist and yells, “GOVERNMENT DO SOMETHING!” when talking about energy transitions (emphasis mine).

If it was just about economics, if we had no global warming to think about, the slowly-but-surely pace of these transitions would be okay. If you look at one of these forecasts, they all say about the same thing: What you look at is a picture that’s pretty gradual, with natural gas continuing to gain at the expense of both coal and oil. But, you know, 1-percent-a year-type change. If you look at that from a greenhouse-gas point of view—if you look at forecasts—every single year we’ll be emitting more greenhouse gases than the previous year.

Gates in a smart guy, however he’s horribly wrong and misguided on this. I’ve already written how computer models on the Earth’s climate tends to vary, so scientists can’t agree on what’s going to happen. But Gates is also wrong in saying the free market can only be pushed into investing in alternative energy. He actually explains why the government shouldn’t be involved in energy exploration, while pushing for it (emphasis mine).

Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today’s and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with what’s tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems, like “Okay, what do you do with coal ash?” and “How do you guarantee something is safe?”

The government is the one setting up the regulatory framework, not the free market. This is something Ayn Rand complained about in Atlas Shrugged. Remember, John Galt developed an alternative energy engine, but decided not to market it because of the power of the unions and collectivist thought. So if the government didn’t get so involved in what businesses were doing, it’s completely possible the market would actually demand alternative fuels. If it doesn’t demand it, then it’s up to the seller to convince the buyer why his or her product is better than what they currently have. Then word of mouth starts spreading and the cash could start pouring in. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen because the market is pretty much always in flux, but Gates obviously believes energy comes in waves. He’s just buying into the entire global warming hysteria. His solution to all this is more government spending because obviously the government can fix everything..

When people viewed cancer as a problem, the U.S. government—and it’s a huge favor to the world—declared a war on cancer, and now we fund all health research at about $30 billion a year, of which about $5 billion goes to cancer. We got serious and did a lot of R&D, and then we got the private sector involved in taking that R&D and building breakthrough drugs.

Realistically, we may not get more than a doubling in government funding of energy R&D—but I would love to see a tripling, to $18 billion a year from the U.S. government to fund basic research alone…

Gates is ignoring some of the criticism that the FDA actually stunts the growth of innovation and keeps drugs which might actually cure cancer from hitting the market (while punishing the innovator for going outside their guidelines). Gates isn’t pushing socialism as Drudge and Independent proclaimed, but really a form of mercantilism. Here’s how Library of Economics and Liberty describes mercantilism.

Domestically, governments would provide capital to new industries, exempt new industries from guild rules and taxes, establish monopolies over local and colonial markets, and grant titles and pensions to successful producers.

Sounds a lot like what Gates wants right? The sad part is the Gates Foundation is doing a great job of funding things which government won’t. It really seems like Gates wants to believe the free market will solve the problem, but he’s so convinced himself it won’t that he can’t help running to the government. He sees how much it costs to get things started up and goes, “Only government money can solve this,” withing looking into why the costs are so high. It isn’t just because of the free market, it’s because of how many regulations there are on the local, state, and federal level. The solution isn’t tossing out government cash, it’s hacking away at government power like Hercules did the Hydra. The problem is it’s easier to bow at the feet of the leviathan, like Gates is doing, than it is to fight it. This is why Gates is part of the solution, but also part of the problem. His decision to use his own money to fund research is fantastic. His desire to have the government fund even more research will only hurt taxpayers and stunt market growth.

Bjorn Lomborg thinks it is. In today’s Wall Street Journal, he takes exception with the UN’s continued pushing for a “solution” for “climate change”, formerly known as “global warming”. Lomborg thinks that it ignores the real problems out there and this focus on global warming takes money away from them for what is, at best, a marginal problem.

In a world in which malnourishment continues to claim at least 1.4 million children’s lives each year, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, and 2.6 billion lack clean drinking water and sanitation, this growing emphasis on climate aid is immoral.

For instance, says Lomborg, according to a recent study, if the UN spent .57% ($570 million) of the $100 billion climate-finance goal on mosquito nets to help control malaria, it could reduce malaria deaths by 50% by 2025 and save approximately 300,000 lives.

Instead, the UN is more interested in the world’s largest wealth redistribution scheme. Somehow the scam has rich nations happy to pledge their citizen’s money and poor nations lining up to receive it. How much will actually go toward addressing the real problems Lomborg highlights is anyone’s guess, but if history is to be a guide, not much. There’s a reason the poorer countries are poor and that has much to do with who is in charge.

Anyway, Lomborg points to the obvious, or at least what should be obvious, in terms of this rush to be “green” and what the world (and the UN) could be doing instead:

Providing the world’s most deprived countries with solar panels instead of better health care or education is inexcusable self-indulgence. Green energy sources may be good to keep on a single light or to charge a cellphone. But they are largely useless for tackling the main power challenges for the world’s poor.

According to the World Health Organization, three billion people suffer from the effects of indoor air pollution because they burn wood, coal or dung to cook. These people need access to affordable, reliable electricity today. Yet too often clean alternatives, because they aren’t considered “renewable,” aren’t receiving the funding they deserve.

A 2014 study by the Center for Global Development found that “more than 60 million additional people in poor nations could gain access to electricity if the Overseas Private Investment Corporation”—the U.S. government’s development finance institution—“were allowed to invest in natural gas projects, not just renewables.”

Wow. Electricity. Its been with us for over a century. We all know its benefits. We all know how well its access could help lift those without it out of poverty.

Yet the UN is more interested in chasing the chimera of “global warming” and its unproven science. The reason, of course is power. Money and control equal power. And this scheme with $100 billion changing hands under the auspices of the UN offers undreamed of opportunities for those in the UN to engage in an unprecedented level of graft. There just isn’t the level of opportunity in helping the world’s poor gain electricity.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry believes people who are hesitant to proclaim that man-made global warming is a problem shouldn’t be in office. He opined the notion to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell at his Climate and Clean Energy Investment Forum after she asked him why the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates weren’t really talking climate change. He’s pretty confident it will come up during the General Election debates and thinks anyone who says it’s not that big a deal, is just ignorant (emphasis mine).

But when I hear a United States senator say, “I’m not a scientist so I can’t make a judgment,” or a candidate for president for that matter, I’m absolutely astounded. I mean, it’s incomprehensible that a grownup who has been to high school and college in the United States of America disqualifies themselves because they’re not a scientist when they’ve learned that the Earth rotates on its axis but they’re not a scientist; where they’ve learned that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and it does so 24 hours a day; and you can run the list of things that we know science tells us happens, and we accept it every single day. And to suggest that when more than 6,000-plus peer-reviewed studies of the world’s best scientists all lay out that this is happening and mankind is contributing to it, it seems to me that they disqualify themselves fundamentally from high public office with those kinds of statements. And I think the American people will decide that this year, because the American people are overwhelmingly in favor of doing something about climate change.

First thing’s first: Kerry isn’t saying those who are “climate change deniers” should be barred from public office. He just doesn’t think they should be elected because they’re “anti-science.” It’s similar to President Barack Obama’s “The debate is settled” comment from 2014, and just as wrong. Former Obama Administration officials Dr. Steven Koonin wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2014 how scientists don’t agree on what’s going on with the Earth because computer models tend to vary.

The models differ in their descriptions of the past century’s global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere’s energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate’s inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.

Does this mean Kerry would disqualify any scientist who pointed this out? It sure seems like he would, based on his comments about politicians who don’t believe in climate change. But that’s being horribly short-sighted and not taking into account how data changes. The Earth isn’t some stagnant rock which doesn’t do anything, and the weather changes on a regular basis. Here in Texas it’s a not uncommon to have it be warm, then cool, sunny, then rainy all within a two hour period. That’s not because of global warming, it’s because of just how things are.

The biggest problem with Kerry’s comments is how purist and anti-thought he is. Kerry doesn’t want scientists, he wants an echo chamber to confirm his own bias when it comes to what’s happening with the weather. He doesn’t want politicians to have a debate, he wants them to just rubber stamp any proposal he thinks will reduce carbon emissions and “save the planet.” It’s “manbearpig!” without South Park and Al Gore. The fact is, having a bunch of “yes men” political leaders won’t solve anything. The Democratic-Republicans ran into this problem during the presidency of James Monroe when Congress was pretty much 100% Democratic-Republican. They ran into situations where political backstabbing and petty bickering caused their own downfall. If the U.S. elected a bunch of politicians who were of the same mind they would still fight over things because they’re human. How often does the conservative echo chamber on Twitter fight over stupid “high school stuff” which has nothing to do with actual thought or debate? A climate change echo chamber would do the same thing. Factions would erupt because people aren’t “pure enough” or “want to go far enough,” and when one faction finally dominated it would purge the unbelievers. Which is kinda already happening right now, as Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post.

It mocks the very notion of settled science, which is nothing but a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate. As does the term “denier” — an echo of Holocaust denial, contemptibly suggesting the malevolent rejection of an established historical truth.

Maybe 150 years from now the world turns into how it was in Robocop with Sunblock 5000 being sold because there’s no ozone layer. Maybe 150 years from now we’re all living in Winterworld. The fact is we don’t know and there’s no way to accurately predict everything. Just don’t tell Kerry that. He might “disqualify” you for not being on board with his dire warnings.